Tag: Ignite Waterloo

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Silent, but keeping busy

It’s been quite a long while since my last post here. It was an unintentional break, caused by inattention and a focus on other activities.

uxWaterloo continues to be a monthly priority for me, and for the other folks who join in on our regular meetings. January featured a visit to Beertown on Waterloo to learn about designing a restaurant experience. We have another good one this month, with Daniel Iaboni talking about designing for augmented reality.

Also in January was Interaction 13, the annual conference of the Interaction Design Association. This year’s version was held in Toronto, and I spent the whole week there enjoying some terrific talks, and meeting some amazing people. There was much to learn and think about!

There was an Ignite Waterloo event to attend back in the fall, with another coming up this week. While I’m no longer directly involved in organizing the events, I’m looking forward to extending my attendance streak to a perfect 11 events.

I also made it out to the first meetings of the KW Ruby on Rails Developers meetup. We use Ruby on Rails at Karos Health, and it’s good to hear from others about their experiences and approaches.

Speaking of Karos, fall was very busy with preparations for our annual visit to Chicago for the RSNA conference. It was a rewarding experience, as always.

The biggest holder of my attention, of course, was Fluxible, which came and went last September and provided a great experience for everyone involved. We’re in planning mode for the 2013 edition of Fluxible, and should have news to announce soon. Needless to say, we’re excited about doing it again!

2013 is off to a great start, and I’ll be making a more conscious effort to keep this blog updated.

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An omnibus post to wrap up June

I had another busy month in June, which made for another sparse month for blog posts. Here are some of the highlights of what kept me busy.

Damian Pope delivers a talk at Ignite Waterloo 9

(Ignite Waterloo 9)

On June 12 Ignite Waterloo held its ninth event, this time at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. Once again, it was hugely popular, with tickets selling out in just a few hours. I’ve helped to organize these events since the very first one, and this version really felt like the best yet — the speakers were great, the venue was fantastic, and everyone had a great time.

After nine events, though, I need to take a break from Ignite Waterloo, mostly because I need to focus on Fluxible, a conference that I’m co-chairing with Bob Barlow-Busch in September. It’s been keeping me busy finalizing details around speakers and the program. Bob and I are pretty excited about it, and we’ll be opening up registration very soon. I’ll write more about Fluxible in the near future.

A table top covered in sheets of paper with sketches and notes

(uxWaterloo design workshop)

June featured two uxWaterloo events, rather than the more usual one event. The first was another visit to Felt lab, while the second was a design workshop focused on helping out Tula Foundation, a not-for-profit with a health-care project in rural Guatemala. I’m happy that uxWaterloo is easing into summer mode now, with a couple of low key social gatherings in July and August, details of which will announced soon.

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Busy!

I’ve let my blog slide more than usual lately, in part due to being busy on a number of fronts. Here’s a bit of an update that also serves as an explanation!

There’s always plenty to do in my regular work at Karos Health, including a February trip to Las Vegas for the annual HIMSS conference. It was the company’s first trip as an exhibitor to that particular conference, and with our successful visit we’re already committed to going again next year.

February also saw the eighth Ignite Waterloo event at the terrific Waterloo Region Museum. I’ve been an Ignite Waterloo organizer since the very beginning, and it was great to see that people continue to enjoy our events. The next one will be even more special, as we have some very cool plans in the making for our ninth event.

uxWaterloo remains on ongoing pursuit for me, and our monthly meetings are a wonderful way to spend my time. Organizing them with Bob Barlow-Busch is a real treat, and the support that we get from our community of attendees is gratifying. Our February event was essentially a socializing one, where the discussion centred on conference experiences. Our March event was a trip to Felt lab to see the projects that REAP student teams have been working on. It sounds like everyone found the meeting productive and fun.

Speaking of REAP, I’ve been involved there from the beginning as well, acting as a sort of design mentor to the student teams. It’s an easy thing to do, as the student teams really do all the work. I just ask them questions about what they are up to and answer their occasional questions. Connecting REAP with uxWaterloo was a happy opportunity that just seemed inevitable.

A newer initiative is Fluxible, a design event that Bob Barlow-Busch and I are planning for September 2012. We’ve got some interesting speakers and great venues lined up, and we hope to announce more news soon.

Finally, I’ve been busy since January teaching an undergraduate course in presentation design at the University of Waterloo. It’s a joint offering under both Digital Arts Communication and Speech Communication, and the course is another rewarding experience for me. We’re nearing the end of the term, and I’m looking forward to the Ignite-style presentations that my students will be delivering in class. Maybe one of them will apply to Ignite Waterloo and deliver a presentation there.

Sometime way back in January I also managed to make it out to DemoCampGuelph and StartupCampWaterloo, both of which are always enlightening and entertaining.

As I said, I’ve been busy!

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March roars in like a lion

Last week was a bit of a blur as March roared in with the usual commitments at work keeping me busy and several extra-curricular activities added to the mix.

Wednesday started with Communitech’s Tech Leadership conference, an annual event that provided a great opportunity to meet people and engage in conversations. It also featured a pretty impressive lineup of speakers. I have to confess that Geoffrey Moore’s keynote presentation was a slight disappointment; while he’s a dynamic speaker, the material didn’t seem to add much in the way of new insights to what he has previously published. This particular crowd has to have been pretty familiar with the concepts of crossing the chasm.

The next session for me was with Scott Berkun, whose talk on the Myths of Innovation picked up on the theme of his book of the same name. I’ve heard Scott speak before and knew that I would enjoy his talk, and I did just that.

Following Scott’s talk, I travelled with him and my uxWaterloo conspirator Bob Barlow-Busch out to Quarry Integrated Communications in St. Jacobs, where Scott had agreed to do a special uxWaterloo lunch time talk. The theme was creative thinking hacks, and the format was completely open and driven by questions from the audience. It’s the same format that Scott used when he last spoke to the group, and it works well.

Wednesday evening was spent at Design Exchange Waterloo, where I acted as an industry panelist along with a couple of members of the local design community, Graham Whiting and Tammy teWinkel. The event featured enlightening presentations and lively conversations with many students. The hardest part was deciding which teams to give awards to, but after much deliberation we were able to arrive at decisions. The next event will likely be in the fall, and I’m looking forward to it.

Thursday was, of course, TEDxWaterloo. I hadn’t planned on attending, but some last minute schedule changes and the timely appearance of tickets changed that. As with last year’s inaugural event, it was a day of stimulating and inspiring presentations from some distinguished speakers. It was all terrific, but the most delightful surprise for me was Ben Grossman’s presentation on the hurdy gurdy, an ancient musical instrument with which Ben made some striking music while he was on stage. Moreover, between the two sets of talks, Ben provided wonderful background music that, for me, enhanced the many conversations that I had.

Sprinkled throughout the week were a few meetings with some of my fellow Ignite Waterloo organizers as we make plans for our next event. More news on that later.

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A fifth Ignite Waterloo is coming

Logo: Ignite Waterloo

I’ve been involved in organizing Ignite Waterloo, which produces a series of events in Waterloo Region, since the first event in 2009, and it’s been amazing to watch the events grow in popularity since that inauguration of the series. We now easily attract well over 200 people to these things, and, as I was telling someone last week, we have relied pretty much on word of mouth and social media to spread the news about our activities. Of course, there’s much more hard work than that to get an event off the ground — and there are many people who make it happen — but it’s been a big hit with audiences and speakers alike with very little traditional communications.

The next Ignite Waterloo event is scheduled for Tuesday February 8 at the Communitech Hub in Kitchener, and even though we only announced the date and venue on January 11, we’re already pretty much sold out. Still, try to get a ticket if you want one and see if you can get lucky.

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uxWaterloo this week and Ignite in November

This week I’ll be enjoying the September meeting for uxWaterloo (the snappily, and concisely, renamed User Experience Group of Waterloo Region) on Thursday at the Accelerator Centre. We’ve got a fun design workshop planned, which should be a great opportunity to work together with UX folks and maybe we’ll all even learn something, too. Come on out.

Looking farther down the road, Ignite Waterloo has announced the date and location for the fourth evening of talks, conversation, and general good cheer. November 18 is the date, and the new location is the Conrad Centre for the Performing Arts. We’re excited about the new venue, and hope to deliver another great event. If you’re interested in being a speaker, head on over and sign up.

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Ignite Waterloo is coming back on March 3

Time flies. It’s already been over two months since the first Ignite Waterloo event last November 25. The second event is scheduled for March 3, 2010. Like the first event, it will be held at the Children’s Museum in Kitchener, and will feature 16 talks on a wide range of topics. Eight speakers have been announced already, with the rest to be revealed soon.

Registration is open, but tickets appear to be moving fast — 100 gone as I write this — so head over to the registration page if you want to attend.

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My November IgniteWaterloo talk

Ignite Waterloo has released videos of 16 talks from the November 25 first event on Vimeo. It’s great to be able to watch the talks again, as it really was a wonderful night. I’m somewhat relieved to discover that my talk, entitled Metaphor in product design: Are you sure that’s an album?, turned out okay. Note that it started life as a blog post here, but the video expands on the post a little and is more fun!

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5 minutes, 20 slides, and a stage

A presenter at the first Ignite Waterloo event

Ignite Waterloo now has its first event in the rear-view mirror. I’m happy to have been able to give a talk — Metaphor in product design: Are you sure that’s an album? — and even happier that it went reasonably well. Ignite is a challenging format, and I wasn’t at all certain that I’d pull it off. I think I did, despite what feels in retrospect like an inadequate amount of rehearsal on my part. I can’t stop editing and revising the talk my head though!

The other speakers were all terrific, and the range of topics and experiences presented was inspiring. I have to confess that I especially enjoyed the talk given by my wife, Jayne Thompson, on climate change at a local level and flooding on the Maitland River.

The cupcake decorating contest was a success too, though I didn’t get a close look at all the entries — I spent the early part of the evening on door duty, which turned out to be a fine way to meet folks.

It’s less than 24 hours later and I’m already looking forward to the next event sometime next year.

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Ignite Waterloo is ready to go with first event

Logo: Ignite Waterloo

There’s a lot of great stuff going on in Waterloo Region. Something that I’ve been working on for some time with a group of like-minded co-consprators is Ignite Waterloo, a local version of a global movement that presents events at which people have five minutes and twenty slides to make a presentation on just about any topic. The results are engaging, funny, enlightening, and help to build connections in local communities and across the world.

Planning and preparations have been going on for many weeks now, and it’s been a great experience to see the group come together. The first Ignite Waterloo Event is on November 25 at the Children’s Museum in Kitchener. There are 16 talks scheduled for this night, as well as a cupcake decorating contest that anyone can participate in. There will be food and drink on hand, and a chance to talk with the presenters and with anyone else who shows up for what promises to me a fun evening. I’m even doing a presentation myself on this first night.

Tickets are available today, and are free. If you’re interested in attending, get your tickets soon, as space is limited.